Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Following a brain-stem stroke in 2011, the Canadian rabbi and poet Ronnie Cahana lost the use of his limbs and moved into a long-term care facility. Nine years later, with his body especially vulnerable when COVID-19 began to take hold, he was forced to spend two years in nearly unbroken isolation. Filmed remotely by his daughter, the filmmaker Kitra Cahana, the short documentary Perfecting the Art of Longing profiles her father as he surveys this period of solitude from his bed, away from the love of his family, and especially his wife Karen. Exercising his extraordinary poetic talents from one small room, Cahana describes his feelings of loneliness as a gnawing physical sensation felt throughout the entire body, and reflects on how he’s able to find some solace in the warmth of his memories.
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
video
Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes